But a manageable location for my plan.

Except for the three in the alley.

And the other guy.

I know I have to remove the three closest to the building from the picture before Vukovic arrives, which, if he leaves work at the same time every night, could be in the next ten minutes. Steeling myself for what’s to come, I push the thoughts of the guy by the mosque out of my mind for the short term, put my hand on the latch of the door to the real estate agency, and take one deep breath. Then I step out onto the sidewalk and begin walking in the direction of the alley. I stroll past my target’s building on my right and continue forward, closing on the three men smoking in the dim light. I don’t look up at them; I just advance as if I’m planning on walking by.

I pass the building that shields me from the other man in the square, the bozo I take for the lookout for the muscle team, and then, when I’m just ten feet from the three men, I stop and turn their way. All three are looking at me; they drop their smokes onto the sidewalk.

“Hi, gents. Any chance you guys speak English?”

The man in the middle is the leader; this is clear in an instant. “What do you want?”

“I was just wondering what’s going on.”

“What?”

“C’mon. Three big dudes standing around a dark alleyway next to a rape van. What’s the plan here, fellas?”

“Keep walking,” says another of the three, and now I recognize the accent. These guys aren’t local. They’re Hungarian.

Scanning their clothing and their shoes as I speak, I say, “I think you guys need to call it a night. Go get a beer.”

They look at one another in confusion now, and my eyes burrow into the folds of their jackets, their front pockets, the cuffs of their pants. I don’t see any weapons printing there, but it’s dark and these guys seem like pros, so just because I don’t yet know where they are hiding their guns doesn’t mean they aren’t hiding guns.

The man in the middle takes a step closer, and the others do the same. “Who are you? You are not police. You are not from here. Why do you care where we stand?”

I don’t answer immediately; I just stare the man down with a slight smile on my face. My actions are bizarre, true, but I have a plan. Right now I’m just talking to them, but I’m doing it in a way that ratchets up the heat slowly to the point where they will eventually realize that I am, in fact, a danger, and not just some oddball American tourist.

It’s all to elicit the reaction I’m looking for out of them.

But so far, I’m not getting what I need.

Time to turn the ratchet some more.

Still looking the men over, I lower my voice from its light and airy tone, giving it some heft. I say, “I’m the guy who’s going to stop you from doing your jobs tonight.”

This, plainly, is a threat, and I begin to get what I seek from the Hungarians.

In my business, we call them grooming cues. A subconscious touching of the area where a weapon is hidden when an armed person feels a threat and is readying himself to draw.

They all do it within seconds of one another. The big man on my left crosses his hands in front of his waist and surreptitiously pats just above and to the right of his crotch. This tells me he’s got a pistol in an appendix holster to the right of his belt buckle.

The man in the center unzips his coat and then, as he takes his hand away, brushes across the right side of his chest under his arm. From this I determine he’s also carrying a handgun, but in a shoulder holster.

And the one on my right may have multiple weapons, but his left hand slips nonchalantly into his pants pocket, and I can see he’s taken hold of something there. It’s printing on the fabric now, and it looks like it could be a closed switchblade.

While this is happening, the leader of the group asks me again who I am and what I want with them. I can tell he is stalling for time, trying to figure out if I’m with Vukovic, if I’m some idiotic American mugger, or if I’m something else.

You got this, Gentry, I tell myself, psyching myself up for the violence that I know is mere seconds away. But while I do this I keep talking. “So if you guys just want to get back in that van and head home to Budapest, it would probably be for the best, because nothing good is going to come from—”

The man on my right takes a nonchalant step forward, but I read his intent. He’s closing the space, getting into striking distance, and I know this means his knife is coming out.

I could go for my gun but I sure as shit am not going to fire it right outside the home of the man I’m planning on snatching in a couple of minutes; it would turn the dark square into a mob scene of onlookers before Vukovic even arrives. Instead I keep talking, angling my body towards Knife Man so I can get a foot up in his face fast when he goes for it.

He goes for it.

Just as I shift weight he turns into a flurry of movement, lunging forward while pulling a switchblade. It opens with a click that echoes in the alleyway, but before he can stab me I send one of my size ten-and-a-half leather Merrell boots up and into his nose, and I hear the bone snap as his head pitches back hard enough to give him whiplash.

With my right leg still coming down from the kick I throw myself forward to the man in the middle, who is now drawing from his shoulder under his jacket. I pin his hand there against his weapon before he can pull it, and then, as soon as my right leg lands, I launch my left foot out towards the guy on my left, short-circuiting his appendix draw by kicking his hand at his belt, breaking one of his fingers as his pistol clatters into the alleyway.

I head-butt the man in the center now, striking my forehead against the top of his nose while still controlling his gun hand against his body.

My ears ring and pain fires from my head into my spine, but he falls back towards the wall and slides to the pavement, and I can tell by the blood that his nose is broken, as well.

No gunfire so far, which is good news, but this hasn’t exactly gone down quietly. All three of them made some sort of loud noise when I struck them, and the inevitable echo through the alley into the square makes me certain that the lookout in the alcove fifty meters away is aware his associates are in some sort of a melee.

I pull the gun out of the center man’s shoulder holster as he falls onto the cobblestones, conscious but temporarily out of the fight because of his broken nose. The guy on the right also has a busted snot box, but he’s pulling himself up by the back bumper of the gray van. From the looks of him I’ve got three seconds or so before he becomes dangerous again, so I turn back to the man on the far left.

Instantly I see that this dude still has a lot of fight left in him.

He’s lost his pistol but he draws a hooked knife from a belt sheath at the small of his back under his jacket, and he slashes wildly with his uninjured hand as he lunges my way. I duck the blade, shift to his right, and use the pistol I just lifted from the leader of the group to bash him in the left temple as hard as I can.